Google's Gmail crashes

Google's Gmail web-based email service has been restored
for millions of users worldwide after an outage lasting at least two hours.

According to Google the problem with Google Mail is now
resolved and there is nothing to see here move on please. It is the second major disruption was in February, when
about 113 million users in Europe, Asia, the US and elsewhere were unable to
get into their accounts.

The service also crashed a few times in 2008 but
underwent significant upgrades and operated without incident until the
February outage. However this time a lot more of the world is dependent
on
Google's technology. Gmail is the world's third most-popular email
program with
about 149 million users worldwide in June, ranking behind the free
email
services offered by Microsoft and Yahoo. Google has been encouraging
more businesses to use its
services which it delivers using cloud based computing.

Google claims that its web-based services are more
reliable than those handled in-house, but big outages such as yesterday's pour
cold water on that idea. The big crash follows a small outage on Monday that wiped
out email to only a "small subset" of users.

Tuesday afternoon's outage affected "a
majority" of Gmail users and lasted about an hour and 45 minutes until the
problem was fixed, the company said. It is not saying what went wrong or why back-up servers
failed to work.